Top 10 Ways to Make Money on the Internet

Based on luck, strategy and business savvy, domain name flipping can be one of the more lucrative ways to earn a living online. The term comes from the real estate trick that involves buying old, undervalued houses, fixing them up to make them more attractive and modern-looking and selling them for a much higher prices.

In this case, the old and outdated place is not a house, but rather a domain name -- the main address for a Web page. With a little bit of searching, dedicated domain flippers locate unused, poorly maintained Web sites that have generic and recognizable identifiers and buy them. They usually pay a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars, but after extensive updates that make the site more business- and user-friendly, the domain name can fetch several times more than it was originally worth. The domain bird-cage.com, for instance, was bought for a mere $1,800 in 2005 -- after a redesign two years later, the site was sold for $173,000 to a bird cage vendor [source: Bhattarai].